Featured Article

Benchmarking Your In-House Fraud Investigation Team

ACFE report highlights best practices

November/December 2015

ByAndi McNeal, CFE, CPA

To address the lack of available benchmarking information for internal fraud investigation departments, the ACFE collected data about our members' internal investigations teams. We analyzed how they're structured, how they performed and how they measured their effectiveness. Here's a small portion of the survey results to whet your appetites.

In an ideal world, an organization's management wouldn't need convincing to invest in anti-fraud initiatives. Anti-fraud teams would use their allocated resources as effectively and efficiently as possible. However, for many companies and agencies, one or both of these areas present challenges. Additionally, organizations often treat fraud investigation teams like any other department — they must justify their expenditures, prove their value and vie with other departments for allocations of financial and human resources.

One of the best ways for any team to measure and report its effectiveness is to benchmark its structure and performance against industry norms. The ACFE has received numerous requests over the years for benchmarking information related to in-house fraud investigation teams. How many people are typically on the team? To whom does the team report? What is each investigator's average caseload? How long does it take teams to turn around a case? What metrics are teams using to assess their effectiveness? Each time we received a request of this nature, we went digging and discovered that no information like this was publicly available. So we decided to tap into the collective knowledge of the ACFE membership and compile it ourselves.

The results of our research are available in our new report, "Benchmarking Your In-House Fraud Investigation Team."

To whet your appetite, here we give a small portion of the survey results. To read the full report, and learn more about how other fraud investigation teams are structured and how your investigation team measures up, seeACFE.com/team.

Related Articles

Moving fraud awareness from the back room to the boardroom

The ACFE’s Report to the Nations on Occupational Fraud and Abuse has led to the classification and analysis of thousands of occupational frauds. But, perhaps, more importantly, it has shown organizational management and the public the dire need for well-planned fraud awareness, deterrence and prevention programs.